Saturday, 29 November 2014

Facebook and other internet giants may be getting the blame for terrorism at home and abroad, but we know that the blame for fanning the flames lies a lot closer to home in the governments of Britain and the United States.

When it comes to cyber warfare, the US claims that the terrorists are the real threat. Yet, a new book gives the lie to that assertion: the US has led the world in developing the weapons of 'information wars' and now has greater technical reach and sophistication than any other force on the planet. Shane Harris's new book, @War, is a gold mine of information on the historical development of US cyber power, initially as a defensive move and increasingly thereafter as an offensive weapon against all rivals, large or small, nation states, non-state actors or particular individuals. And, despite continual and loud claims about the rule of law, America's cyber warfare violates American, international and others' laws through the sheer level of intrusion and sabotage carried out.

For example, had Iran planted the Stuxnet virus into the American nuclear enrichment process, President Obama would declare it an act of war requiring the superpower to exact revenge. Yet, that's exactly what the US and Israelis did to Iran's nuclear plant at Natanz, causing massive damage.

Harris talks about the emergence of a new 'military-internet complex' of state and private corporations collaborating to make data available to the NSA and a whole myriad of state agencies surveilling everything that moves in our social media, emails, phone calls, and other electronic communications. So much for the rule of law; and even when there's a hint that the law does not adequately serve the American foreign policy establishment's voracious appetite for information, the law can be changed.

That's what happened under the Bush administration when several top officials at the Justice Department threatened to resign if the president authorised the bulk collection of metadata, including details of an email sender's other information. The programme was pulled for a few months, the law altered to permit the previously illegal actions and this was all handed over to the Obama administration in 2009.

What does Haris mean by military-internet complex? It means the nine largest corporations - like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook (yes, Facebook), YouTube and Apple - allowed the US government access to their information: that's 20% of total download traffic via YouTube; 425 million Gmail users; 281 million Yahoo accounts; and 420 million Outlook users; and 250 million iPhones sold by Apple in 2012.

Some corporations are so close to the NSA that they have a decades-long connection: SAIC in California, for example, is known by the NSA as "NSA-West".

Military-internet complex also has a face or faces, moving around the complex, making money, selling skills, and developing ever more powerful weapons of cyber warfare for full spectrum dominance. Mike McConnell, for example, who was intelligence adviser to General Colin Powell in the early 1990s, went on to head the NSA and created "offensive cyber teams" that would, among other things, violate international law by trying to "knock out the lights in Tehran". After leaving the NSA in 1996, McConnell worked as head of cyber security for Booz Allen Hamilton, making millions by selling back to the government what he'd learned at the NSA. In 2006, McConnell moved to director of national intelligence after a phone call from his old patron, VP Dick Cheney, and a chat with his old friend secretary of defence, Robert Gates.

Hacking into others' computers and networks and information flows, much of which flows through America itself, is now routine and integrated into the other forms of lethal military violence at the disposal of the United States.

And its efffects are lethal: it means intercepting phone calls, emails, etc... and relaying them all in real time to someone who decides that it is time to kill the enemy.

Not for the first time, complaints about the power of others - states, groups - and the relative weakness of the United States bear little resemblance to reality, in the post-truth virtual world of US power and paranoia.

Thursday, 27 November 2014

We
share this important post-verdict message from United for Peace &
Justice with which we are in full accord. USLAW is affiliated with UFPJ.

The Verdict Is In:

STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE PEOPLE OF FERGUSON

"As
I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I
have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their
problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while
maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully
through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about
Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of
violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.
Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my
voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without
having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world today -- my own government."

- Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence, April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

Dr.
King understood the fundamental connections between the war at home and
the wars abroad. In the wake of yesterday's grand jury decision not to
indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown, United for Peace
and Justice continues to stand in solidarity with Mr. Brown's family,
the people of Ferguson and communities around the country who are
committed to transforming this tragic miscarriage of justice into a
powerful movement to replace racism, injustice, violence and the
militarization of police with economic and social justice for all.

In
the days to come, we call on groups around the country to express their
solidarity by joining or organizing local nonviolent actions.

In a presidential address to the American people, Barack Obama said this:

"2014, therefore, is a pivotal year.
Together with our allies and the Afghan government, we have agreed this
is the year we will conclude our combat mission in Afghanistan....
America's combat mission will be over by the end
of this year.

"Starting next year, Afghans will be
fully responsible for securing their country. American personnel will be
in an advisory role. We will no longer patrol Afghan cities or towns,
mountains or valleys. That is a task for the
Afghan people....

"At the beginning of 2015, we will have
approximately 9800 U.S. service members in different parts of the
country together with our NATO allies and other partners. By the end of
2015, we will have reduced that presence by roughly
half and will have consolidated our troops in Kabal and and on Bagram
Airfield. One year later, by the end of 2016, our military will draw
down to a normal embassy presence in Kabul, with a security assistance
component, just as we have done in Iraq....

"The bottom line is that it is time to
turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our foreign
policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq....

"We have to recognize that Afghanistan
will not be a perfect place and it is not America's responsibility to
make it one. The future of Afghanistan must be decided by Afghans."

WASHINGTON —President Obama decided in
recent weeks to authorize a more expansive mission for the military in
Afghanistan in 2015 than originally planned, a move that ensures American
troops will have a direct role in fighting in the war-ravaged country for at least another year. (emphasis added)

Mr. Obama’s order allows American forces
to carry out missions against the Taliban and other militant groups
threatening American troops or the Afghan government, a broader mission
than the president described to the public earlier
this year, according to several administration, military and
congressional officials with knowledge of the decision. The new
authorization also allows American jets, bombers and drones to support
Afghan troops on combat missions....

Mr. Obama’s decision, made during a
White House meeting in recent weeks with his senior national security
advisers, came over the objection of some of his top civilian aides, who
argued that American lives should not be put at
risk next year in any operations against the Taliban — and that they
should have only a narrow counterterrorism mission against Al Qaeda.

But the military pushed back, and
generals both at the Pentagon and in Afghanistan urged Mr. Obama to
define the mission more broadly to allow American troops to attack the
Taliban, the Haqqani network and other militants if
intelligence revealed that the extremists were threatening American
forces in the country.

Tuesday, 11 November 2014

Harvard's Belfer Center marks Armistice day by announcing how significant, if not essential, to maintaining peace is the preparation for war. And how important it is in such a policy-oriented centre to embrace so many former and serving military. The list is pasted below. It contains several well-known peacemakers, Orwellian-speak for so many who played leading roles in illegal aggressions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

A key member of the American military-industrial-academic complex - he was president of Columbia University before entering the White House in 1952 - Dwight Eisenhower, warned of the damaging effects of so close a relationship of the universities with the federal government and military that were gateways to vast research grants and funding.

Eisenhower's complaint elided his own role in the construction of a permamnent war economy and a militarist culture but at least he pointed out its dangers.

Today, there's hardly a voice within the American establishment that dares speak out against the degree of attachment of the foreign policy establishment to a militarist, interventionist mindset.

Wednesday, 5 November 2014

Many years ago, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote a great book - Why Americans Don't Vote; they cited an array of customs and byelaws across the US, especially in the deep South, that made it very difficult if not impossible for the poor and minorities to register. the 1960s put paid to a load of those aspects of petty apartheid.

But we live in a time of political and ideological decay as the power of big money screams, unions have lost power and alternatives have been organised out of politics, and the main parties - almost identical in terms of philosophy and corporate funding and a militarist mindset - dominate the corporate media.

And the cycle of excluding the poor and minorities from the franchise continues to deepen... see below for examples.

New voting rules threaten to lower turnout

An
illustration of President Lincoln at GOP headquarters in South Bend,
Ind. Contemporary voting restrictions, critics say, are threatening the
post-Civil War concept of universal suffrage.E. Tammy Kim

Fear of voter fraud and two rulings by the Supreme Court — Crawford v. Marion County in 2008 and Shelby v. Holder in 2013 — have resulted in an unprecedented array of rules and restrictions across the U.S.
This election cycle, 21 states have new voting laws
on the books. From registration to the ballot box, critics say, these
statutes have made it difficult to vote, particularly for minorities,
the poor, students and seniors.
There are already reports of voters being turned away from the polls.
In early voting, a Houston, Texas judge reported having to deny a 93-year-old veteran with an expired driver's license. On election day, hundreds of Georgia residents complained of having to pay for parking at voting sites and were unable access registration and polling-place information due to computer problems. In Hartford, Connecticut, a judge issued an emergency ruling
extending the hours at two polling places that had lost access to voter
registration data. And an African American student in Texas was sent
away from her voting location due to non-compliant ID.
Al Jazeera America has documented the travails of low-income voters in Indiana (see here and here) and the campaign launched by North Carolina racial justice groups against a name-checking program
that threatens to wipe thousands of voters from the rolls. Stay with us
as we continue to document voter turnout and voters turned away.

For Moment, the World Embraces the Cuba Model – and Slaps the Empire

A
team of 165 Cuban medical doctors and nurses have arrived in Sierra
Leone to support the Ebola response efforts. (Photo: WHO/S. Gborie)

This week,
the nations of the world – with two savage exceptions – instructed their
emissaries at the UN General Assembly to tell the world’s
self-designated “indispensable” country to end its 54-year-long trade embargo against Cuba.
The virtually unanimous global rebuke to the American superpower, in
combination with the extraordinary breadth and depth of acclamation
accorded Havana, tells us that it is Cuba, not the U.S., that is the
truly “exceptional” nation on the planet.

It was the 23rd time that the United Nations has rejected the
embargo. The outcome was identical to last year’s tally, with only the
United States and Israel voting against the non-binding resolution.
Although the list of American allies on the Cuban embargo issue could
not possibly get any smaller – Israel, after all, can only exist if
joined at the U.S. hip – this year’s political environment was even less
deferential to the reigning military colossus. In recognition of its
singular commitment to the fight against Ebola in Africa, Cuba soared,
once again – the hero nation.

Despite having suffered cumulative economic damages of more than $1
trillion at U.S. hands over the last half-century, the island nation of
11 million people has made itself a medical superpower that shares its
life-saving resources with the world. No country or combination of
nations and NGOs comes close to the speed, size and quality of Cuba’s
response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa. With 461 doctors, nurses
and other health professionals either already on site or soon to be sent
to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, Cuba sets the standard for
international first-response. The Cuban contingent of medical
professionals providing direct treatment to sick people outnumbers that
of the African Union and all individual countries and private
organizations, including the Red Cross. (Few of the 4,000 U.S. military
personnel to be deployed in the region will ever lay a well-protected
hand on an Ebola patient. Instead, the troops build field hospitals for
others to staff.)

Doctors Without Borders is second to Cuba in terms of health
professionals. But the French NGO is a swiftly revolving door, churning
doctors and nurses in and out every six weeks because of the extreme
work and safety conditions. Cuba’s health brigades are made of different
stuff. Every volunteer is expected to remain on duty in the Ebola zone for six months. Moreover, if any of the Cubans contract Ebola or any other disease, they will be treated at the hospitals where they work, alongside their African patients, rather than sent home. (One Cuban died of cerebral malaria, in Guinea, last Sunday.)

It goes without saying that the Cubans are committed for the duration
of the Ebola crisis; they have been at Africa’s service since the first
years of the revolution. President Raul Castro reports that 76,000
Cuban medical specialists have served in 39 African countries over the
years. Four thousand were stationed in 32 African countries when the
current Ebola epidemic broke out. (Worldwide, Cuba’s “white-robed army”
of care-givers numbers more than 50,000, in 66 countries – amid constant
U.S. pressures on host countries to expel them.)

In sheer numbers, the Cuban medical posture in Africa is surpassed in
scope only by the armed presence of AFRICOM, the U.S. military command,
which has relationships with every country on the continent except
Eritrea, Zimbabwe and Sudan. The governments of Liberia, Guinea and
Sierra Leone collaborate militarily with AFRICOM, but the heavily-armed
Americans were of no use when Ebola hit. (According to a Liberian
newspaper account, the Americans caused the epidemic, a widely held belief in the region.)

Indeed, the Euro-American legacy in Africa, from colonialism (Liberia
has been a de facto colony of the U.S. since the days of President
Monroe) to western-imposed financial “structural adjustments” that
starved public health systems, is the root reason Liberia and Guinea
have only one doctor for every 100,000 people, and Sierra Leone has just
two.
Cuba knows colonialism well, having seen its independence struggle
from Spain aborted by the United States in 1898, followed by six decades
as a U.S. semi-colony. For Cuba, service to oppressed and exploited
peoples is a revolutionary act of the highest moral caliber. That’s why,
when the call went out, 15,000 Cubans competed for the honor to battle
Ebola in Africa. As reported in The Guardian,
doctors like Leonardo Fernandez were eager to fulfill their moral and
professional mission. “We know that we are fighting against something
that we don’t totally understand,” he said. “We know what can happen. We
know we’re going to a hostile environment. But it is our duty. That’s
how we’ve been educated.”

In the same way and for the same reasons, 425,000 Cubans volunteered
for military service in Angola, from 1975 to 1991, leaving only after
Angola was secure, Namibia had held its first free elections and South
Africa was firmly on the road to majority rule. These Cubans were
preceded by the doctor and soldier Che Guevara and 100 other fighters
who journeyed to Congo in 1965 to join an unsuccessful guerilla war
against the American-backed Mobutu regime.
Cuba has been selfless in defense of others, whether against
marauding microbes or imperial aggression. “We never took any natural
resources,” said Rodolfo Reyes Rodriguez,
Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations and a veteran of the war
against white-ruled South Africa’s army in Angola. “We never took any
salary, because in no way were we to be perceived to be mercenaries or
on any kind of military adventure.”

For the United States, military adventure and the imperative to seize
other countries’ natural resources or strangle their economies, are
defining national characteristics – in complete contrast to Cuba. The
U.S. embargo of its island neighbor is among the world’s longest-running
morality plays, with Washington as villain. On this issue, the world’s
biggest economic and military power could neither buy nor bully a single
ally other than the Zionist state deformity.

Even Djibouti, the wedge of a nation between Eritrea and Somalia that
hosts the biggest U.S. (and French) military base in Africa, spoke
against the embargo on behalf of the Organization of Islamic
Cooperation. Lithuania, a rabidly anti-Russian Baltic state, voiced the
European Union’s objections to the embargo. Ethiopia, Washington’s
henchman in the Horn of Africa, nevertheless opposed U.S. policy toward
Cuba on behalf of the UN’s “Africa Group.” Tiny Fiji articulated the
Group of 77 and China’s opposition to the trade blockade. Venezuela,
Cuba’s major health partner in Latin America, voiced the anti-embargo
position of Mercosur, the Common Market of the South.

Cuba’s neighbors in CARICOM, the Caribbean Economic Community, were
represented by Saint Kitts and Nevis, whose ambassador pointed to
Cuban-built hospitals and clinics throughout the region; the hundreds of
Cuban doctors that have provided the only medical services available to
many of Haiti’s poor before, during and after the catastrophic
earthquake of 2010; and the thousands of Caribbean students that have
benefited from free university education in Cuba.

Cuba’s exemplary conduct in the world has made the yearly UN vote on
the U.S. embargo a singular opportunity for all the world body’s
members, except one, to chastise the superpower that seeks full spectrum
domination of the planet. It is the rarest of occasions, a time of
virtual global unanimity on an evil in which the Empire is currently
engaged. Once a year, the world – in both effect and intent – salutes
the Cuban model. For a moment, humanity’s potential to organize itself
for the common good illuminates the global forum.

Monday, 3 November 2014

Why does Britain need to feel special?

The world is getting restless with some states’ attachment to nuclear
weapons. So why is Britain going out of its way to deepen its nuclear
relationship with the United States?

The small community of observers who watch Britain’s quiet moves to extend its nuclear lifeline with the United States have just been rewarded–the ten-year renewal and modification of the US-UK nuclear Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA)
to be debated in Parliament next Thursday. Critics claim the
arrangement stretches and breaks Britain’s legal commitments under the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and ensures Britain remains dependent upon America for both its nuclear arsenal and foreign policy direction.
But
it goes deeper than that: Britain and other governments face a choice.
In an age of climate change, resource scarcity and other global
inter-dependencies, the chances of successful adaptation of human
societies to these stresses depends upon governments cooperating more
effectively within multilateral frameworks. Privileged arrangements like
the MDA that undermine this approach must be swept away.
The MDA governs cooperation in matters related to nuclear weapons between the United States and the UK.
The two states share Trident missiles from a common pool, technologies
associated with the design and development of nuclear warheads, and
critical parts of the huge ‘boomer’ submarines that carry the missiles
and warheads. For example, despite different requirements that mean the UK
will have to fill four missile tubes with concrete ballast or use them
for different purposes, both versions of the new follow-on submarines
will have a common missile compartment with twelve missile tubes,
command and control facilities and crew quarters.

The Nuclear Information Service points out that this particular update to the MDA also opens the door to far more extensive cooperation on nuclear naval propulsion technology in particular. The PWR3 nuclear reactors in UK
Trident successor submarines will use next generation American naval
nuclear propulsion technology. Though not governed by any particular
treaty, navies tend to protect their nuclear propulsion technology as
closely as states guard their nuclear weapon designs. It is a highly
sensitive aspect of the cat and mouse games that makes up anti-submarine
warfare. The fact that the Americans are willing to share so much of
their most prized secrets is an indication of the unique relationship,
and gives a clue to one of the core reasons why the British elite are so
attached to the MDA arrangements.

From a technical perspective, the modification and renewal of the MDA
makes every sense. Both countries deploy the same Trident missile
submarine system and use identical components. Cooperation on the next
generation of technology saves money, results in better systems and
cements the relationship between the two countries. Anyone that believes
in a strong relationship between the two countries (and that includes
almost everyone in the British political elite) must surely agree that
if both countries are to field nuclear weapons, it makes sense to share
information and technology.

What’s more, the amendments to the MDA also introduce important new dimensions to US-UK
teamwork in the field of nuclear counter-proliferation and intelligence
sharing. Surely this can only be a good thing? In sum, the two
countries justify cooperation in the development of technologies we
would rather live without as necessity to hold the line and prevent
their enemies from developing their own weapons capabilities.
But this ‘better us than them’ mentality fails to acknowledge the bigger picture.

There are 184 non-nuclear weapon state members of the NPT
who have foresworn nuclear weapons in their own national security
strategies on the basis that global security is secured by mutual
restraint. The five recognized nuclear weapon states have also
acknowledged this by promising to negotiate away their own arsenals at
an early date. This is a question of legal obligation. BASIC received a formal legal opinion from Rabinder Singh QC and Professor Christine Chinkin of Matrix Chambers back in 2004 suggesting the MDA runs counter to our NPT Article VI obligation to engage in nuclear disarmament negotiations.
But
more than this, it’s a question of confidence in the future and
commitment to global multilateral arrangements. These matter far more to
our future than protecting military arrangements that deeply undermine
the capacity for multilateralism.

Other states exercise
self-restraint as non-nuclear weapon states and appear to thrive without
suffering nuclear blackmail. It is not as if nuclear weapons are beyond
their reach technically. One state that displays no such self-restraint
is North Korea, one of the poorest countries on the planet. Claims this week from the US
Commander of Forces in South Korea that North Korea has developed a
nuclear warhead that can fit on top of its missiles may be premature,
but no one should doubt they are well on the way to having a significant
nuclear deterrent.

But most still choose not to have nuclear weapons. True, some in NATO
believe they depend upon extended nuclear deterrence, but abstain from
pursuing their own nuclear deterrent). States without such a
relationship survive in turbulent regions, and actively choose
non-nuclear security arrangements. They recognize they are safer if they
and their neighbours find other ways of settling their disputes and
achieving stability without nuclear deterrence.

Nevertheless,
non-nuclear weapon states are increasingly restless over the continued
attachment to national nuclear arsenals within a handful of states. They
believe this not only threatens nuclear war, but also deeply harms
long-term confidence in the NPT and other
non-proliferation initiatives. Sustainable confidence requires stronger
non-proliferation instruments and genuine nuclear disarmament–a movement
towards universal non-discriminatory membership. Britain’s renewal of
its nuclear arsenal, despite not being in direct strategic competition
with any other state and being within the NATO alliance, is particularly corrosive to confidence.

So
why, if we are so close to the United States, should Britain choose to
spend a third its defence equipment budget over the next 15 years on
Trident? This is a system with dubious military utility that essentially
doubles up on the US umbrella our other allies seem content to depend upon.

It
could be because Trident pulls the Americans in close and gives us a
unique status in relationship to them. But this goes both ways. It also
cements British dependency on the United States, and by extension
commits the UK to a policy of maintaining US
hegemony and exceptionalism. These are the very values that undermine
the global multilateral systems we will increasingly rely upon for our
real national and global security as global challenges of climate change
and resource competition really bite –systems we claim to support.

We
don’t like it when North Korea pursues their own nuclear weapons
capability, or any suggestion that they are supplying Syria or Iran with
nuclear or missile technology triggers strong reactions (and illegal
‘preventive’ military strikes from Israel). Yet the British government
quietly renews the MDA with minimal fuss and
no question of Parliament having a vote on the matter. Once complete,
officials can get on with trading far more sophisticated and potent
weapon systems the North Koreans can only dream about.
It is time
we joined up our thinking: the worlds of nuclear deterrence, defence and
alliance need to meet those of nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation
and fair global governance. For too long these communities have been
kept apart, and the deterrence discussion has been pre-eminent in the
thinking of national leaderships because of a self-fulfilling lack of
confidence in multilateral arrangements.

The annual First Committee of the UN
General Assembly responsible for multilateral disarmament negotiations,
in session in New York this month, is just approaching its finale–a
series of resolutions on ideas to develop and strengthen multilateral
regimes. It is a precursor to the month-long NPT
Review Conference next May that coincides with the British General
Election, the first in a generation that precedes the final decision on
whether we renew our only nuclear weapons system.

With business as
usual in Whitehall’s Ministry of Defence, and deeper nuclear weapon
relationships developing between the British and American shipbuilders,
weapons designers and navies, is there really any hope of a new dawn for
the non-proliferation regime?